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Comment by polka_haunts_us | Hacker News Reader

For a politics shifted perspective of this, sometime late last year before prayer before meal, my mom was talking happily about how she hoped Jeff Bezos got the guillotine. Just before "Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts...", "Boy wouldn't it be funny if a mob necked Bezos". Her main news sources are Salon and Twitter threads of various left (Bernie or more) wing writers.

I remember referencing the incident a couple months ago post Biden winning and she was like "The dinner table isn't an appropriate place to talk about this".

I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.

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> I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.

Just out of curiosity, would you say that this has ever happened to you?

I'm asking because I also see many people around me going 'literally insane' (and yes, in both the 'left' and 'right' ways. Basically becoming consumed by some drip of outrage pieces and provocative online discourse).

But I also recognize that I 'went insane' at one point too. Being a kid who grew up on the nascent internet, I became addicted to reddit when reddit first emerged, and I can look back to around the Occupy Wallstreet era when I became obsessed with rhetoric that was disconnected from my own lived experience, and repeated certain ideas that were often disconnected from reality or evidence.

It pains me to see friends and relatives go through the same process. But I 'survived', and I do hope many others can too.

> I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.

Our current situation reminds me of the brain-eating computer on the book Diamond Age that somebody created to crack passwords. It's like a lot of people are simply gone, and some superconciousness too over their bodies, and it's on the controls 24/7.

I still hope this reverses once the simplistic ideas get hit again and again by reality. Those groups are working very hard to shield themselves, but I imagine some portion of them must always be exposed to the real world.

What an amazing analogy. I doubt there is a solution short of severe changes in how most people use the internet and media. Attention stealing apps and their consequent dopamine addictions seem to have killed rational thinking, so much that people will refuse to believe facts and evidence. It feels better to be part of a group that believes a thing than to process a conflict and adapt your worldview. Hmm, what else does that sound like? :-)

> Hmm, what else does that sound like?

You mean a religion? People host all kinds of superconcioussness, that's part of what we are. But it's not normal for some to be on the controls a lot of time. This is similar to religious zealotry, what is rather rare.

> I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.

TDS is very, very real and when paired with this whole covid thing it only got worse. Peoples deep issues with the last 4 years joined forces with media fear mongering to create a perfect storm resulting in what will be someday be looked back upon as a massive "social engineering" failure.

If you think extreme polarization and degradation of critical thinking is exclusively a problem of the other side, it probably applies to you as well.

Oh dude… believe me I had TDS big time. Watching the last 17 months of medical fascism cured me of that real quick. Now I’m not on anybody’s team.

There is a large group of people I used to know and respect that completely and literally lost their marbles this past year and a half. And I mean that in all sincerity… they are a shell of who they were before. Blindly listening to “experts” coupled with a visceral hatred for “the others” and intense, unexamined fear can land you in a very bad mental state.

Question authority. All authority. Even “the experts”. Always. They do what they are incentivized to do, which often has nothing to do with what is in the best interest of society at large.

I didn't mean this to be one sided. It just happens that my parents were right wingers. Yes, it's happening on both sides.

I suspect it's leaning more to the right for older generations.

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